


After Afterglow

by canis_lupus_nubilus



Category: Power Rangers Dino Charge
Genre: Chiley, Fluff, M/M, One-Shot, Romance, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-05
Updated: 2018-07-05
Packaged: 2019-06-05 20:20:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15178577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/canis_lupus_nubilus/pseuds/canis_lupus_nubilus
Summary: Somewhere between the hoarse, needy gulps of air; the aching release of his weary muscles and the loss of weight that had just moments ago pressed so closely into his sweat-sodden back; between the benumbing of every nerve ending and the moment the diaphanous curtain of afterglow parted from his eyes — between then and now, a chiding voice has already berated him with cries of, “What the heck were you thinking?”





	After Afterglow

**Author's Note:**

> Just something that came to mind. I love these two.
> 
> It's short and sort of done real quick-like, but it's only meant to be a little fluff. Everyone needs a little fluff now and again.

**Title:** After Afterglow  
**Author:** canis-lupus-nubilus  
**Series:** _Power Rangers Dino Charge_  
**Chapter:** One-Shot  
**Genre:** Romance/Fluff  
**Pairings:** Chase/Riley  
**Warnings:** Boy-love. Don’t like, don’t read.

* * *

Somewhere between the hoarse, needy gulps of air; the aching release of his weary muscles and the loss of weight that had just moments ago pressed so closely into his sweat-sodden back; between the benumbing of every nerve ending and the moment the diaphanous curtain of afterglow parted from his eyes — between then and now, a chiding voice has already berated him with cries of, “What the _heck_ were you thinking?”

It’s quiet in the room, save the lethargic twirl of the ceiling fan. It’s July and hot; the room fills with that familiar kind of humidity that feels like one million hands at once touching every crevice of exposed skin. Riley sits up straight in bed, nervously running his hands through his hair and staring blankly, anxiously, into the little folded crater the crème bedsheets make in his lap, over his crossed legs.

_Crap_.

In some imagined final account of all the world’s Big Mistakes, Riley exaggeratedly reckons this little hiccough of his will most definitely show up. Right next to fidget spinners and self-driving cars and nuclear war. Someone really should have told him, when he was maybe a bit younger and a bit more _careful_ ¸ that even in the blissful, all-encompassing heat of the moment you should never – _never_ – let go of your powers of reason. Not even if it’s just _that good_ , and especially not if you start to let your guard down and, god forbid, be wholly vulnerable for just an instant… Loose lips sink ships, or something like that…

Oh, whatever. The point is: he shouldn’t have said it. Not once in all their time together has he ever let his guard down, even an inch, so that something like that could just slip out willy-nilly. So why now? What could have possibly been so different about _this_ instance that caused him to slip up, to say… well, something like _that_?

He could always feign ignorance, play the innocent part… Yeah, sure, like that could ever get by Chase; as if Chase didn’t just finish staring him down with that peculiar look of maybe surprise or bewilderment or who knows what else. Yet Chase has always been, above all his other unique and specific skills, exceptionally good at maintaining a poker face, so who knows what he’s _actually_ thinking about all this… Riley had turned over onto his belly, his cheeks nuzzling cozily the warmth of the pillow as the periodic ache in his bottom had finally started to lessen in intensity, when his eyes had trailed over to Chase, who was sitting upright, watching him. Unblinking eyes blank, unreadable, like little gossamer pebbles…

Riley sighs, his exhale heavy as a leaf-blower’s blast and just as loud. _Okay. New plan: I’ll just tell him I was joking. All just a misunderstanding. He jokes all the time, right? So it wouldn’t be weird for me to joke too, right? Right?_

No – he knows better than to joke now. Not about something like this. And anyway, that _look_ , the way Chase’s gaze had penetrated right through him, through every membrane, cell, and surface… No way you come back from that with just a shy grimace and a nonchalant: _Oops, well, hey, this is awkward, isn’t it?_

The little ache comes back, making itself known just inside his backside, some nerve ending battered to weariness. Come to think of it, it was that very ache that had forced the words out of him, so, really, he can summarily blame all of this on Chase, one way or another… At just the moment the intensity, the sensitivity of every nerve in his body had begun to subside, at the very moment his eyes had closed with a moment’s peace, Chase had unluckily chosen _that_ time to surprise him with one brutish, final thrust that seemed to strike a match inside his breastbone and set alight every nerve once again, hot and burning to the point of near pain… And, hearing words he’d only ever said quietly, safe within the confines of his mind, slip out past his dry, cracked lips… Chase’s body falls close and tired and heavy onto his own, pushing all its weight and force into his body, and here they come, suddenly, rebelliously. He can never take them back, all those unyielding words…

It takes a minute, just before the afterglow of intimacy begins to wear off, before Riley realizes what it is he’s said.

_Crap, crap, crap crap crapcrapcrap_.

And to make matters more harrowing, Chase had done exactly what he _would_ do, had stood up all silently with a short, “Wait here,” which Riley can’t help but take ominously. Not a single clue to go on, not even a slip of a facial expression on which Riley can hang his hopes. No, if there were any doubts in his mind that Chase had perhaps misheard or not heard at all, that little Look, followed swiftly by the Exit, is the nail in the coffin. He heard; he knows. And now he’s gone, probably off to breathe or reflect or completely rethink this relationship between the two of them.

Riley’s fingers begin to pinch and prod the fabric of his sheets. He sniffles and wipes a trace of lingering moisture from the bridge of his nose. He gulps; his throat is dry.

_Relationship?_

Well… what else could it be? Riley can’t remember exactly (the events of a year have, by now, metastasized into a cloudy blur) but haven’t the two boys moved steadily, progressively past a simple physical relationship? Pretty sure when you begin to fill the majority of your encounters with more cuddling than anything purely “physical,” things have already changed. You’re well past a fling, like it or not… At least, that’s what Riley feels. And now ( _crap_ ) Chase knows that this is exactly what Riley feels. Irrevocably…

It was presumptuous. It was unintentional too, to be sure, but there’s no use for Riley to focus on that little detail anymore, thorny and inconvenient it may be to him. What’s done is done. He said it – it’s out there _in the cosmos_ , or whatever, so he may as well suck it all up, roll his eyes in that special Riley-esque way that makes Chase giggle like an idiotic schoolboy, and just own what he said rather than try to pretend he didn’t actually say it or that it’s not reflective of what he truly feels.

_What I truly feel…?_

He starts, his heart leaping up into his breastbone, as Chase imperceptibly reenters the bedroom. Riley’s eyes immediately begin to scan the other boy’s face for any sign of pity or annoyance or joy or anything at all, but finds nothing, no hint to steer by. Chase isn’t going to let him off the hook that easily, he can see that much… But what he does see is the plate Chase is carrying, and the peeled, cleft-in-two bright orange fruit that lays and wobbles as Chase takes his place again, sitting right next to Riley with his legs stretched in front of him.

Riley gulps again, desperate to say something before Chase has a chance to berate him even more than he’s already berating himself. Anything will do at this point, an apology, something self-deprecating, anything but sitting here in silence waiting for the sky to fall.

“Uh,” he manages, his mouth hanging open.

“Here.” Chase passes him one half of the sliced orange, which Riley takes hesitantly, eyeing it fretfully as if it might be laced with black powder and nitroglycerine. When he doesn’t respond, Chase adds rather helpfully, “You eat it, mate.”

At which Riley resists with all his might the urge to roll his eyes. “Chase,” he mutters, tripping in a nervous jolt over all the words in his mouth that won’t come out. “Listen—”

Chase holds up a sticky finger dripping slightly with the juice of his portion of their snack. His other hand slips a bit of peeled orange into his mouth, which he momentarily chews and swallows. “First, eat,” he says, and to Riley’s dismay he does not say anything else.

So Riley obeys. Cautiously at first, but then, as he successfully calms himself (surely if Chase had wanted to all-out rebuke him, that moment had already passed?), he begins to nibble here and there on a bit of orange before hungrily peeling off bits with quick ferocity. Once he’s swallowed the last bit and wiped his fingers on a nearby towel (which is also covered in, well, everything else), he sighs, blinks, and stares up again at Chase’s impossibly handsome face.

“So,” he begins, bracing himself.

Chase silently reaches over the side of the bed for his shirt, previously tossed aside in something of a hurry. Once it’s back over his head and tucked comfortably around his hips, he lies back, his head resting against the bed’s old, peeling headboard with a soft _thud_. “So,” he says, his fingers coming together and falling against his chest, his forearms bent like little wings.

Riley struggles onward, seeing no other option and possibly no other opening. Why does Chase have to be so difficult? “We should probably talk.”

Chase raises his eyebrows, not at all insinuatingly.

“About what _just happened_ ,” Riley adds, with more than a little exasperation.

“Okay,” Chase says, his poker face an annoying façade Riley can’t quite see past, even now. He groans internally when Chase’s shoulders shrug with apparent casualness. “Talk.”

_Way to make this easier_. “Well,” Riley begins carefully, deliberately. “I bet you’re wondering…What I mean is, you’ve gotta’ be wondering what just happened…”

Chase stares at him, his fingers coming up to scratch the stubble at his cheek. “Someone once told me you should eat after sex is all,” he says flatly. “For energy maybe or somethin’ like that.”

“Before that,” Riley says shortly.

And this time it’s Chase who blinks, something registering in the back of his mind. He looks up at the ceiling and the steadily spinning fan, at the little shadows the moonlight through the window brandishes upon the bedroom walls. “If you want,” he finally mutters.

One more violent groan at the back of his throat before Riley is off, barreling manically forward without caution or care: “The first thing I want you to know is that it was an accident. I didn’t mean to say it. It just sort of fell out of me before I had a chance to stop it or before I even realized what I was saying. Maybe I was so caught up in the moment, how intense it was, how good it was, I don’t know,” ignoring the trace of a satisfied smirk appearing at the corner of Chase’s mouth, “but having said all of that I just don’t want you to think… Chase, I just don’t want you to think anything poorly about me.”

He stops, catching his breath, his exposed chest beginning to pulsate. Chase is still staring at him, so he tries a different approach. “Is there anything you’d like to add to this? You can’t expect me to sit here and do _all_ the talking, Chase.”

“Wouldn’t be much of a change,” Chase says under his breath, beginning to pick a bit of stray orange from a back tooth.

“Don’t,” Riley says, sudden and pleadingly, to the surprise of both of them. “Don’t do that. Please. Just tell me… Just tell me whatever you need to tell me and I’ll listen and move on. I think I already know what’s coming, so just get it over with. Okay?”

A moment passes before Chase says, steadily, after much thought, “You didn’t mean what you said.”

Riley stops, stares. Whatever he was expecting from the other boy, it wasn’t this. “What?”

“I’m saying that’s what you’re saying. You’re saying you didn’t mean it. That it didn’t mean anything.”

Not a question but… what, exactly? To Riley it feels like something too final at this very moment, like a stern condemnation of something. He feels ashamed to look too long into the other boy’s eyes. “Chase,” he begins, “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

Not looking at Riley now, only looking into his lap, Chase replies, “Say whatever you want to say. Only don’t say something you don’t mean.”

And this time Riley feels it, sharp as if it were solid: the piercing, painful thrust Chase’s quiet accusation makes, tearing against Riley’s insides without pity. Something has happened between them, something Riley has done that he doesn’t quite understand. “You’re angry,” he finally says, though truth be told it's nothing more than a guess.

Chase shrugs. He replies with an unreadable, “Just don’t like not knowing what we are, mate.” And, making sure to catch Riley’s eyes again, if not for just a moment: “Not every day someone says they love you.”

Here comes the house of cards, tumbling down, flimsy from the very beginning if Riley ever thought he had a foundation strong enough to hold up his act. He has made, he realizes perhaps too late, a pretty big miscalculation. Here he is, expecting some kind of difficult maneuvering out of the mess he’s made, expecting maybe for Chase to just laugh and offer one of his usual boyish grins to make this whole thing go away – “’Salright, I know what you meant, no worries” – but instead, it’s Riley who’s left out on a limb. Chase’s eyes are sullen, his mouth firmly shut.

He’s actually _upset_.

“Chase,” Riley mutters, trying to make sense of the other boy’s reaction. “Why are you—?”

“Only tell me if it’s really an accident,” Chase says sharply, cutting through Riley’s bewilderment. “Only don’t make me feel like a fool because you got a little lightheaded for a bit and let something slip that shouldn’t’ve.”

Riley looks down into his own lap, shamefaced. He feels something stirring in his groin, in the pit of his stomach. “I didn’t think—”

“’Course you didn’t.”

“Chase, I didn’t think you’d react like this,” Riley offers defensively. His words begin to tumble out of him. “I thought… I thought you’d be angry, or embarrassed, or wouldn’t want to see me anymore, or…”

He hears a little scoff, not mean or brutal but filled with surprise and, maybe, even something plaintive.

“Then you know me less than you thought you did, Riles,” Chase says.

Trapped in the silence between them, Riley wonders: _what was the accident, and what was real_? If it came from him, if it came from his heart… could it still be real even if he wasn’t ready for it to be known, or perhaps was too damn scared to _risk_ it being known for fear of what might come next? Nothing has prepared him for this reaction – if he’s gauging Chase’s response accurately, does this mean the other boy might feel the same way? That their little romps every other night aren’t just a way to burn off steam or let go of a little physical or mental stress? That they’re not just each other’s fling but… something more? A fling doesn’t end like this, not with the archetypical lady’s man being _upset_ about the possibility of nothing more…

Riley's fingers touch lightly the back of his neck, trailing up to his fleshy, warm earlobe to scratch timidly a little itch. “I always feel a little silly when you call me that.”

“Call you what?”

“Riles,” Riley replies softly.

“Can’t see why,” Chase says, looking over at the other boy with a faint grimace. “Don’t like it, I’ll stop.”

Riley shakes his head. “No. I like it… I just always felt like it’s supposed to mean maybe more than you’ve let on.”

“Than _I’ve_ let on?” Chase rolls over suddenly, his shifting weight upon the bedsheets nearly pulling Riley over and onto him. “Mate, you don’t hear me goin’ around givin’ pet names to Tyler and Koda.”

“You call Shelby ‘Shelbs,’ don’t you?” Riley asks.

This time it’s Chase who rolls his eyes dramatically. “You know that’s not the same. She’s my sister, _your_ sister, practically.”

He’s not wrong. As far back as Riley can remember, this _has_ been the one thing that has always been his alone. Shelby’s affectionate nickname aside, has Riley ever heard Chase use pet names for anyone else, even women who’ve come and gone? How could he have missed something like that? Hearing it coming from Chase now, seeing the way he’s _looking_ at him, it seems so obvious…

_Crap_. “Well,” Riley manages through a little sigh, a little shrug. “This is awkward, isn’t it?”

“Doesn’t have to be,” Chase tells him, raising his eyebrows again and using his finger to trace some kind of unruly figure-eight against Riley’s ribs. Then, he asks pointedly, his finger coming to an abrupt stop, “Is it an accident because it wasn’t true?”

In the corner of his eye, Riley can see his shadow against the wall, the curvature of his back in a perfect arch as he stares into his lap again, pondering what to say next. When the trembling in his throat has subsided, he finally says to Chase, “No.”

Chase waits, allowing Riley a chance to amend; when he doesn’t, Chase’s relief becomes more pronounced, more assured. “Then was it an accident because you didn’t think I’d feel the same way?”

Riley shrugs again, leaning farther back against the headboard and letting himself slide down to nearly a sleeping position. “Don’t pretend like all of this just comes to you naturally,” he replies more than a little sardonically. “Like you’re some Casanova who’s done and seen it all before.”

“Well,” Chase adds teasingly, propping his cheek up with his palm and forearm, “not _all_ of it.”

“Or like you haven’t been scared of misinterpreting what you feel or don’t feel and—”

Chase’s finger makes another appearance, stopping Riley in his tracks. “Gonna’ stop you there,” Chase begins methodically, “before you say something that isn’t true. And we both know you’ll regret it if you say something that isn’t true.”

Riley’s mouth lingers open; his eyes widen slightly with no little curiosity.

“I know exactly how I feel,” Chase says flatly, without fanfare. “And I’m not afraid of it.”

His clear confidence, the way it comes across unwaveringly as the final word on the matter, brings a flush to Riley’s cheeks and forehead. He closes his mouth, swallows hard. “So,” he says, “you really do feel the same way then?” When Chase continues to stare at him, Riley realizes he’s being asked, silently and purposefully, to say what he means for the both of them. He swallows again, wishing his mouth wasn’t so awfully dry. When it comes, it isn’t in the form of a question. “You love me.”

A playful, childlike nod; an encouraging grin.

Riley lets out all his air. He is already wrapped again in the other boy’s arms, pushing his weight as hard as he can into whatever he can, his eyes closed tight, his face buried nervously into the crook of the other’s neck. He wants to apologize. He wants to say: _this never happened, none of it ever happened, only this, just forget the rest…_

“’Course I do,” he hears Chase say as fingers run through his hair. Then another heavy laugh from the gut, another smile: “Face like that…”

“I’m more than a pretty face,” Riley corrects him, leaning back for air, his breathing returning to normal… “You should know you can’t love someone for their looks alone.”

But Chase is having none of it. He rolls Riley back over, onto his back, and presses deliberately his own groin and chest into the other boy’s, sensing a growing warmth, a tightness, at each spot that collides with touch. A little gasp is all he needs: his lips press and suck, struggling a little for dominance before Riley, too relieved and exhausted to press the matter, allows Chase as much purchase as he wants… Their tongues press into each other, as needy as their sovereign bodies.

“Say it,” Chase says, suddenly taking his mouth away and holding his hands against Riley’s cheeks, looking hopefully into the crystalline pools of his eyes. “Say it again.”

Though his breathing is jagged and weary, Riley does: “You love me.” Then he feels himself braver, more sure, and presses his own lips into Chase’s, not waiting for permission. He presses as hard as his lips will allow. “You love me,” he repeats to them both, stopping to breathe. Again, after his lips stop softly, half open, against the other boy’s, not pressing but resting without care: “You love me…”

And he does.

**Author's Note:**

> おわり。  
> 7/5/2018
> 
> Music listened to while writing:  
> ♫ "Brace for Impact (Live a Little)," Sturgill Simpson  
> ♫ "Golden Age," Jamestown Revival  
> ♫ "Breathe," The Cinematic Orchestra (feat. Fontella Bass)


End file.
